The Poet in the BoxWe have a problem with Brandon,the assistant warden said.He's a poet.

At the juvenile detention centerdemonic poetry fired Brandon's fistinto the forehead of another inmate.Metaphor, that cackling spirit, drove him to flipanother boy's cafeteria tray onto the floor.The staccato chorus rhyming in his headtold him to spit and curseat enemies bigger by a hundred pounds.The gnawing in his rib cage was a craving for discipline.Repeatedly two guards shuffled himto the cell called the box, solitary confinement,masonry of silence fingered by hallucinating drifters,rebels awaiting execution, monks in prayer.

Then we figured it out, the assistant warden said.He started fights so we'd throw himin solitary, where he could write.

The box: There poetry was a grasshopper in the bowl of his hands,pencil chiseling letters across his notebooklike the script of a pharaoh's deeds on pyramid walls;metaphor spilled from the light he trappedin his eyelids, lamps of incandescent words;rhyme harmonized through the voicesof great-grandmothers and sharecropper bluesmenwhenever sleep began to whistle in his breath.So the cold was a blanket to him.

We fixed Brandon, the assistant warden said.We stopped punishing him. He knows that every violation means he stays here longer.

Tonight there are poetswho versify vacations in Tuscany,the villa on a hill, the light of morning;poets who stare at computer screensand imagine cockroach powderdissolved into the coffeeof the committee that said no to tenure;poets who drain whiskey bottlesand urinate on the shoes of their disciples;poets who cannot sleep as they contemplatethe extinction of iambic pentameter;poets who watch the sky, waiting for a poemto plunge in a white streak through blackness.

Brandon dreams of punishment,stealing the keys from a sleepy jailerto lock himself into the box, where he can hearthe scratching of his pencillike fingernails on dungeon stone.

from Alabanza: New & Selected Poems

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